Another day, another absurdity

Today we are interviewing candidates for a job opening in my department. The job is Quality Assurance Analyst – the qualifications include a background working with Accounts Receivable programs and since we work in long term health care, medical billing would be a real plus. So the boss gives me three resumes. One guy has billing experience, one guy was a programmer with Abbott Labs, nothing to do with health care or billing really as well as very little QA, and the third woman worked with physical therapy billing – jackpot! So I tell the boss yes to the first, no to the second, and definitely yes to the third person. The boss sends me the interview times for the two candidates so I can sit in on the interviews. But what he doesn’t tell me is that he is still interviewing the reject candidate and the bad employee is sitting in on the interview. That’s gotta suck for bad employee, since he is not even qualified to work here at all and he is interviewing a guy with better qualifications than his own.

We get through the two interviews and they both went pretty well so I suggested that they both come back for a second interview where we bring in the subject matter experts to ask more questions. Then the boss tells me that he brought in the guy I rejected because he thought he would be a good candidate for the other job opening we have. The other opening is for a QA Analyst specializing in payroll. I ask why he thinks someone who was directly involved in setting up laboratories would have anything to do with a payroll system. Bad boss says, “He has some database experience which would make him qualified.” DATABASE experience! I thought my head was going to explode – databases are used to store information no matter what system you have. That is like saying that a hypochondriac would be a good doctor because they always KNOW there is something wrong with them.